


Good Kitty

by probably_somewhere



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Adorable, First Kiss, Fluff and Angst, M/M, klance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-09
Updated: 2016-07-09
Packaged: 2018-07-22 14:58:05
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,553
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7443535
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/probably_somewhere/pseuds/probably_somewhere
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The paladins, by nature, have a shockingly deep connection with their lions. They have to work as one to defend the universe, so it's no surprise that such a bond would extend beyond the battlefield. But what Lance didn't expect was for his lion to know more about his emotions than he did.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Good Kitty

Lance wasn't sure if it was cool or creepy that, after spending so much time with their lions--bonding, as Shiro so loved to call it--the giant robots started acting like their paladins.

It wasn't like the green lion started programming computers or the yellow lion turned strange alien plants into a three course meal. No, it was more subtle than that. The black lion became more prone to polarized action, almost like it was feeling Shiro’s PTSD along with him and either fought like mad or couldn't move at all. Keith's lion grew impulsive, and when Lance was in his lion she felt more enthusiastic about making flashy maneuvers than she used to. In the few times the lions had ever moved without their pilots, they ended up together in positions so characteristic of the paladins, it was uncanny. The yellow sprawled across the ground, the black curled protectively around the green, and the red and blue poised to fight at a moment’s notice.

Okay, so it was pretty cool.

Lance liked being so deeply connected to another being, even if it was a giant, robotic, sentient lion. He was afraid, though, that something had disturbed their signal after an incident during training one day.

“Lance, watch where you’re going!” Keith yelled, and the red lion veered out of sight through Lance’s viewport. Lance glanced between the pedals and hand saunters, brow furrowed. He’d definitely turned the other way, but the lion had blatantly ignored his controls.

Shiro’s image popped up on his left. “Everything okay? You’ve got to focus, Lance.”

He groaned. “I _am_ focusing. Blue just isn’t listening! I think she might need some repairs.”

The lion growled deep in her throat.

“I think you’ve offended her,” came Pidge’s voice over the intercom. They shot ahead of the blue lion and performed a somersault dive down the face of a sand dune.

“Show off,” Lance mumbled, and delighted himself with the idea that they would be cleaning sand from their lion’s armor for weeks.

Keith’s scoff sounded like static through the feed. “Look who’s talking. Just keep your lion out of my way, alright?”

“Whatever,” Lance spat. Stupid Keith, always messing him up. He could count on one hand the number of times Keith hadn’t gotten in his way, or distracted him, or tried to make him make a fool out of himself, or just… _been there_. Even that guy’s presence made Lance feel like an idiot.

They landed lightly on the ground in front of the castleship nearly an hour later. Somehow it managed to look regal positioned among the sand dunes. “Alright,” Shiro said. “Everyone take their lions back to their hangars, and then we’ll meet for debriefing on the control deck.”

The video feeds fizzled out, and Lance pressed the button on his com as well. He guided Blue toward the hangar and enjoyed the radio silence. “He says that every. Fucking. Time. But we never do anything else. Why does he--”

“Whoa-ho-ho! You kiss your mother with that mouth?”

Lance yelped. “Keith! What the hell? I turned my com off. Get--get out of my air space.”

“Obviously you didn’t turn it off because I’m still talking to you.”

Blue’s paws hit the surface of the hangar, and she knelt for Lance to open the hatch. “Well don’t,” he said, too frustrated with Keith to come up with a better comeback. As always. It was infuriating how easily he got under Lance’s skin. He tore the helmet from his head, so that even if Keith hadn’t disconnected their com link, he wouldn’t have to hear his stupid voice.

Lance jumped from his lion’s mouth, not bothering with the ramp, and rolled into a crouch flawlessly like the badass he was. Let _Keith_ try that. He’d probably break his perfect nose.

He looked Blue over for any obvious signs of damage, thinking back to their fumble in training. It had been a long time since the two hadn’t been in sync, and he knew Shiro would tell him to meditate for an hour in his lion to remedy it. But the strangest part was--before that happened, he’d felt more aligned with Blue than he ever had. Even when forming Voltron, he felt separated from his lion in some way. But in that moment… they felt like one conscience.

Which made his near-collision with the red lion even more strange. He always knew exactly where Keith was, so how had he almost run into him?

Once he determined that there was nothing to fix, he broke into a run for the control room. The rest of the team would be waiting on him, and while he tried to be consistently fashionably late, he recognized that fashionably included a sense of finesse. Too late would be a nuisance, and earn him the wrong kind of attention. No, he had to time it just right.

He stopped a few yards down the hall from the control room and caught his breath. Then he settled into his classic Lance swagger and strode inside.

Three members of team Voltron, Allura, and Coran were huddled around something on the command screen. “Hey, Keith,” Pidge said without taking their eyes from the screen.

“Not Keith,” Lance replied, and everyone looked up at him.

“Lance isn’t the last one here,” Hunk gasped. “Maybe Keith is dead. Someone should go check on Keith. Shiro, should I go check on Keith?”

The black paladin rolled his eyes. “I’m sure Keith is fine.”  
“I am fine, but why are you talking about me?” Keith asked over the hiss of the sliding door, startling Lance. He backed away quickly, too aware of how close he’d been standing to the door and how close that had put him and Keith.

Pidge grinned. “Lance beat you here so we thought you might be dead.”

“I’m so offended,” Lance said at the same time as Keith’s: “Your concern is touching.”

They locked gazes, and as much as Lance wanted to turn away he stuck out his tongue instead. Keith sighed and shouldered past him. Lance’s skin burned with irritation where Keith’s clothes had made contact with his.

“I had to adjust some of the controls in Red,” Keith explained. “And then I stopped by the bathroom on my way here. Happy?”

“Alright guys, let’s focus. We don’t have time for fooling around.” Shiro motioned them back together, and the team gathered in a circle for their usual debriefing session.

Shiro talked for a while about various aerial maneuvers they needed to improve and new ones he wanted them to try. Coran interjected bits about developing a combat-shorthand language so they could communicate more effectively. Allura told them some nonsense about how connecting with their lions gave them access to thoughts and feelings so deep that the paladins might not even recognize them yet. Lance wasn’t listening.

No, he was thinking about how all the weird things that kept happening seemed to involve Keith. Then it hit him--Keith was _screwing with him_.

But he knew he couldn’t just outright accuse the guy of playing tricks.

He had to catch him in the act.

***

The next day during training, Lance kept his lion close to Keith’s. If he tried any funny business, Lance would see it.

Other than a few close encounters in which the scrape of metal on metal made Lance’s teeth ache, nothing happened. He was entertaining the idea that somehow Keith had _magnetized_ their lions just to throw him off, but he didn’t think magnetic fields couldn’t be engineered that selectively, so he discarded the idea.

Keith cornered him after dinner that night.

“Would you mind telling me what the hell you were doing out there today?” Keith demanded, face as red as his jacket. “This whole thing may seem like some kind of a joke to you, but the rest of us are trying to save the universe, so if you could just focus for _one minute_ then--”

“Oh, that’s real ripe coming from you! You’re the one who’s been trying to throw me off this whole time! Look, I get that you’re threatened by how good of a pilot I am but it’s really detrimental to the team if you keep trying to sabotage me.”

Keith sputtered, and if it were possible for his face to get redder, Lance thought it would have. Even the curve of his ears poking out from around his hair burned red.

“Sabotage you! I don’t know what’s wrong with your head, Lance, but you’ve got a pretty nasty delusion going on. I’m not doing _anything_ except trying to survive out here!” He bared his teeth like he was about to growl at him or fight him or say more, but instead he just pivoted away from Lance and stalked away. His footsteps looked like something caught between running and walking, and with each impact of his feet against the ground a shiver ran up his body. It jostled his jacket and makes his hair bounce. Lance sneered at the back of his mullet.

“Well, you’re doing a pretty shitty job at it!” Lance shouted after him. Keith rounded the corner with a frustrated moan and disappeared entirely. Lance kicked the floor. His mouth tasted like bile. “Good talk, buddy.”

Not sure what to do with himself, Lance wandered back to Blue’s hangar for some quality lion bonding time. At least his lion wouldn’t sass him, because she understood how frustrating Keith was. The blue and red lion probably couldn’t stand each other either, and Lance needed some non-judgemental support right about now. He slid down to the transport car and drove to the hangar, only to find that--

Blue was gone.

Lance’s heart caught in his throat.

He’d left her here, he _knew_ he had because he always did, and it was kind of hard to lose a giant space lion. So where was she? Lance ran the periphery of the hangar, hoping desperately that somehow the shadows just obscured Blue from his view. But when his search left him empty-handed, he felt himself sliding into panic mode. No, no, _no_ , his lion could not be gone.

He yanked his helmet from a shelf along the wall and shouted into the com feed: “My lion is gone!”

“Lance?” Allura’s voice, echoing as it always did when she talked to them from the control room. “Lance, you mean the blue lion is gone as well?”

“Yes she’s gone and-- _as well_? What else is missing?”

There was the crackle of another signal coming through as Lance shoved the helmet on his head. “--ause my lion is gone too. Something must have come in and taken them.”

Keith’s lion was gone?

“Shiro, Pidge, Hunk, have you reached your hangars yet?” Allura asked. The panic was creeping into her voice as well.

“I’m almost there,” answered Pidge.

“This is impossible!” Coran said. “We would have been alerted immediately if the castle’s defenses had been breached. But my scans show nothing out of the ordinary!”

Shiro’s sigh of relief came through the feed. “The black lion is still here.”

“Yellow lion accounted for,” Hunk declared, and shortly after came Pidge’s confirmation: “Mine’s here.”

“Then where are ours?” Lance didn’t care that his voice cracked. He could feel the lion’s absence like a punch to his chest.

“Lance,” Shiro said. “ _Lance_. Focus. Maybe you can locate your lion through your connection. Take a deep breath and try to find her. Keith, you too.”

“Okay,” Keith agreed, and Lance could almost feel his nod of assent.

Lance closed in his eyes and thought about his bond with the blue lion. He thought about how it felt when they were flying together, how in-sync they were and how whole it made him feel.

A warm filled his chest.

“Guys, I’m getting something.”

He started running.

It was a pull, a force dragging him to the blue lion. This must have been what Keith felt when he first encountered the red, on the Galra ship--he’d said something to the effect of having an out of body experience, like his spirit belonged somewhere his body wasn’t. Lance remembered thinking how strange that sounded, because how could Keith’s spirit belong anywhere else than with his body? Heck, even Lance felt more at home with Keith around. Their banter kept him grounded. But now he understood what Keith had been talking about.

The feeling strengthened as he got closer to his lion.

Somehow, he’d ended up outside the castle, running across sand that gripped at his feet and tried to twist his ankles. He didn’t care about that, didn’t care about anything other than getting to Blue. Maybe it was a trap and a Galra ship was going to kill him and take his lion for good, but he had to take that chance. More than needing to be reunited with the blue lion, he felt that it was trying to tell him something, and that once they met again it would all become clear.

He caught a glimpse of a giant metal tail on the other side of a dune and ran faster. The tail flicked lazily. Lance climbed to the top of the sand mountain nearly on all fours, desperate now. He sensed movement behind the sand, and maybe Blue was fighting something and needed help.

When he broke over the crest of the dune, he felt suddenly, utterly calm. He probably shouldn’t have, though, considering what awaited him.

The blue and red lions were… cuddling?

Their big metal bodies rubbed together, for all the world looking like earth-cats, just so much _bigger_. “What the…?” Lance wondered aloud, a confused frown curling his lips.

A red jacket skidded to a halt in the sand below him, having decided to go around the sand dune instead of over it. Lance was surprised to have beat Keith here.

“Paladins! Is everything alright?” Lance heard the strain in Allura’s voice plainly now.

“Yeah,” Lance muttered. “Yeah, it’s fine.”

He took his helmet off and slid down the dune with it under one arm.

“Are you seeing this?” he asked Keith, who looked as dismayed as he was.

Keith nodded, and looked like he was about to say something. He paused for a moment, listening. “No, no one is hurt, Shiro. We’ll be back to the castle in a few minutes.” Keith took his helmet off, too, and let it drop to the ground beside him. “What are they doing?”

Lance shrugged. “You mean you never had cats as a kid? There must have been at least twenty on my block alone. They always do that when they like each other. Usually I took it as my cue to leave because only one thing ever came next and I learned at a young age that I didn’t want to see that and… _oh_.”

The lions slowed to a stop mid-rub at the approach of their pilots, their purr-like mechanical hum subsiding. A blush rose to Lance’s cheeks. The many implications of their now statuesque space cats’ disappearance came along with it.

“You don’t think that they…” Keith started, but couldn’t bring himself to finish.

“Ay díos, no,” sputtered Lance. “They’re robots. But I don’t understand why they ended up out here, like this. Surely it means something?”

Keith didn’t look at him. “Allura always says that our lions express what we don’t know we’re feeling. Maybe our connections are screwed up.”

“Yeah. That’s probably it,” Lance agreed, but realized halfway through that he didn’t believe it. Something felt right about being out here, just the four of them, and he didn’t want to end it to end yet. They weren’t finished here. “Keith, I…”

“What?”

Lance groaned and sat heavily onto the sand, realizing what he was about to say. Faintly, he heard a voice talking through the feed on his helmet and reached over to turn it off. He took a fortifying breath. “When I was in fifth grade, there was this guy in my class. I hated him.”

One of Keith’s eyebrows raised. “Why are you telling me this?”

“Shut up and sit down,” Lance commanded. “I hated him, and all year I would do the stupidest things to try to get a rise out of him, to get his attention. I thought I wanted him to hate me, too. But--you know that stupid thing adults say when boys are mean to girls? ‘He’s just doing it because he likes you’? My dad told that to my little sister at least three times that year, and it made me so mad because how could anyone be mean to someone they liked? It didn’t make any sense.”

“People actually say that?” Keith looked shocked. He sat down next to Lance, knees up to let his forearms rest on them.

“I know, I know. It’s so stupid, and no matter what there’s no excuse for acting like that, and people only say it when boys are picking on girls, but I realized that’s exactly what I was doing to this kid in my class. I was so mean to him because he made me feel things I didn’t understand and I was so _mad_ at him for it, and…” He trailed off. One more deep breath. “That was when I realized I was bisexual.”

Keith blinked. “Because you were a bully in elementary school?”

“You’re not making this any easier for me, Keith, and _yes_ , because I was a bully in elementary school.” He wiped sweaty palms on his jeans. “I vowed then and there that I would never do that to someone again, because I saw what it did to my sister, how scared she was after that. I couldn’t bear to think I might have put someone through that--”

“Then how come you’re such an ass to me all the time?”

“--shut _up_ , Keith!” He clenched his fists, trying to hold onto his resolve. “I told myself I would never treat a person I liked like that. But middle school is… is pretty fucking awful and I learned that some of things I felt weren’t safe so I tried to forget about them. And I guess that, in the process, I forgot about that vow.”

Keith wrapped his arms around his knees. “Well, that part’s obvious.”

Lance had run out of confidence. He opened his mouth but no more words came out. For once in his life, Lance had nothing to say.

Slow realization spread over Keith’s face like the dawn of a new day. “Oh. You mean. Oh. Well.”

“You can hate me if you want,” Lance said, feeling that all-too-familiar panic of when he let that part of himself exist. “And you can totally forget we had this conversation but I just thought that maybe my lion was trying to get me to tell you this and now I guess I was wrong and I’m really sorry and--”

“This makes things a lot easier,” Keith mused, somehow managing to look entirely unflustered.

“What?”

“I guess it was stupid of me to think you were straight. No on is _that_ hetero, and in retrospect I should have known it was an act.” Keith looked across at their lions, poised with their necks together. “But I usually just find it easier to pretend I’m not interested at all.”

“Now _I’m_ the confused one.” A pressure was building in Lance’s chest again, and it made it hard to breathe.

“Middle school was hard on me, too. There’s nothing like telling your best friend you love him and having him find you on the walk home with his biggest friends to beat you up.” Keith’s jaw clenched hard, and he took a few quick breaths that told Lance he was trying not to cry.

Lance put an awkward hand on his shoulder. “You mean you’re…”

“Gay. Always have been. But I’m almost as bad at flirting as you are, so I’ve never really had any luck with guys. Even after I admitted it to myself.”

“I am not bad at flirting,” Lance said, finding that the easiest part of Keith’s admission to respond to. Then that feeling in his stomach made him spit up more words, harder words. “I think our lions brought us out here so I could ask you out.”

Keith looked sidelong at him, face carefully set so as to betray nothing. “Go on, then.”

“Keith,” Lance moaned. “Would you just--you make me want to--gah! Fine. Keith. I like you. I want to go on a space date with you. I want to hold hands with you and probably also kiss you and please stop looking at me like that and just say _something!_ ”

A smile tugged at the corners of Keith’s lips. Lance couldn’t stop staring at that smile, because it was easier than looking at his eyes and also he kept imagining what it would be like to feel those lips on his.

“Please,” he whispered, unable to keep the quiver from his voice.

Keith laughed quietly. “A space date. Sounds fun. But I think this might already qualify.”

“Do you mean that--”

“Yes.”

“So can I--”

“Yes.”

Lance reached for Keith’s hand and twisted their fingers together.

Keith leaned forward and kissed him.

**Author's Note:**

> Hey, friends. Follow me on tumblr @probably-somewhere for more Voltron shenanigans.


End file.
